American Literature (from 1945 to present)

An Overview

An outlineI. Historical, social, cultural, political background

Leadership of the Western capitalist world; the role of world policemen (the Korean war &the Vietnam war); Cold War mentality (McCarthism or Red Scare); racism; the Civil Rights movement;

feminism; anti-war protests; minority activism

II. Characteristics of the literature in the period

III. Postmodernism

II. Characteristics of the literature in the period

1. poetic tendencies since 1945 A. confessional poetry: Postwar poets would typically write

about an object or a situation which would express or classify their own feeling, showing a growing sense of resistance to the existing culture and at the same time an assertion of the self. Robert Lowell is the lead.

B. The Beat Generation also known as the beat movement, were a group of American writers who emerged in the 1950s. Among its most influential members were Gary Snyder, the radical poet Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. The Beat Generation rejected the prevailing academic attitude to poetry, feeling that poetry should be brought to the ordinary people. Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch are the major Beat writings.

2. American Fiction from 1945 to 1960s (Tongming 298)

a. The talented Southern writers: Robert Penn Warren & Flannery O’Conner, the representatives, followed Faulkner’s footsteps in portraying the decadence and evil in the Southern society in a Gothic manner.

b. Jewish-American writers: the major representatives, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, sought to create a myth for the modern man, though they drew on their Jewish tradition.

c. African American writers: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin

d. J. D. Salinger and John Updike Salinger is considered to be a spokesman for

the alienated youth in the post-war era, and his The Catcher in the Rye is regarded as a student’s classic. Updike’s Rabbit novels examine the middle-class values and portray the troubled relationships in people’s private life and their internal decay under the stress of the modern times.

e. Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk, and Joseph Heller wrote about the waste of war and madness mentality

.

Some terms Existentialism: a philosophical movement

embracing the view that the suffering individual must create meaning in an unknowable, chaotic, and seemingly empty universe.

Modernism: an international cultural movement after World War I expressing disillusionment with tradition and interest in new technologies and visions.

Understanding post-modernism in three contexts (Tongming 281-283)

1. Closely associated with critical theories in post-structuralism, “postmodernity” is the contrapuntal modernity (or a set of thinking strategies) skeptical and critical of the systemized modernity as launched by the enlightenment;

2. In the context of Western Marxism, “postmodernity” refers to the cultural logic in post-industrialist society or late stage of Capitalism;

3. Among the various features that define the literary and aesthetic function of “postmodernism”, certain stylistic preferences and reality-denying tendency are associated with the generation of exhaustion in America in the 1960s.

• Postmodernism: a media-influenced aesthetic sensibility of the late 20th century characterized by open-endedness and collage. Postmodernism questions the foundations of cultural and artistic forms through self-referential irony and the juxtaposition of elements from popular culture and electronic technology.